Still Life with Flowers, Fruit and Game

Centre right in this little copper panel the basket of game birds rests on a carved block of stone, a fragment of antique temple architrave with an egg-and-dart moulding along its edge. The Uffizi's catalogue sheet stops to point at it, because a piece of Roman cornice is not the usual furniture of an Antwerp still life, and the museum reads it as a sign that the picture was ordered by an Italian patron. Jan van Kessel the Elder worked small and on copper, a support that takes a fine brush without any canvas weave getting in the way. The sheet lists what is laid out here: flowers in a glass, plums and citrus, asparagus and artichokes, the basket of birds, guinea pigs and a dog, all of it inside 23 by 33 centimetres. The museum dates it no more closely than the 17th century, though the dated coppers by the same hand at Pitti fall in 1661 and 1664. For a long stretch it was away from Florence altogether, on deposit at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome.